Awarded for egregious censorship, the Jefferson Muzzle awards for 2017 include “a Boca Raton high school that threatened to suspend a student who wore a “Hillary for Prison 2016” T-shirt, the Bradley County Tennessee sheriff who deleted an atheist’s comments from an Easter post on the sheriff’s office’s Facebook page, and the entire United States Senate for passing an anti-Semitism bill that would find ‘blaming Israel for all inter-religious or political tensions’ or comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis punishable speech on college campuses.” (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, April 27, 2017, by Daniel Burnett)
Eight awards out of hundreds of nominees were bestowed this year by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression of Charlottesville, Virginia. The Center pointedly stressed the irony of a North Carolina school superintendent disciplining a teacher conducting a lesson on free speech. The teacher was fired after he stepped on an American flag to illustrate how the First Amendment protects speech. (ABC News, April 27, 2017, by Sarah Rankin of the Associated Press)